We may have found wine's new killer app. The realization came last month, when Jancis Robinson announced that she would let readers access her reviews via CellarTracker.

Launched in 2004, CellarTracker (cellartracker.com) has become a powerful clearinghouse for wine information. I've followed creator Eric LeVine's project for years, sometimes skeptically. Originally it was intended as a way for collectors to track and check out each other's cellars. But the concept has so much more potential: a page for each wine in its database, currently 735,000 and growing daily. Users can rate one, read about one, buy one. And now they can see what critics think in the same place.

How it all began

LeVine developed the technology as an off-hours project when he was a Microsoft project manager. It was born out of his desire to take the spreadsheets that geeky types often used to track their wine bounty and apply open-source principles. Soon two friends joined in.

"We were all checking out what the other person had opened the day before, what they thought about it," he says.

Jump to 2010. CellarTracker has 90,000 registered users, half of whom actively use it to track their cellars. About 40 percent of those active users have voluntarily ponied up cash for premium features. LeVine still runs a one-man show, though he's hoping to add to the ranks this year.

The cellar-management stuff isn't what makes CellarTracker revolutionary, though it's not shabby that its database contains 1.19 million reviews. Other sites, notably Snooth.com, have taken on crowd-sourced reviews with less success. (Snooth's five-point system instead of the 100-point lingua franca, plus an overly fussy interface, make it a harder sell.)

But CellarTracker takes crowd-sourcing reviews a step beyond the Yelps and Zagats by allowing popular opinion to share space with informed expert opinion - without, I'd argue, diminishing the expert value and without sacrificing intellectual property. That has a value not covered by blogs, which, we're still being told, are going to put me and every fellow paid critic out of a job.

But blogs are a publishing tool; they largely traffic in the same writing for which wine writers have gotten paid (or not) since the days of Thomas Jefferson. For all the florid wine prose that swells our hearts, the one thing that justifies a pay model - no different than in the financial world - is what moves markets. In other words, expert scores.

Robinson (a Chronicle contributor) sharing her professional criticism is just the latest addition to CellarTracker's hive mind. Burgundy expert Allen Meadows signed on last fall, and critic Stephen Tanzer was an early adopter in 2005. They allow their own paid subscribers to access their reviews on CellarTracker pages. Add to that a handful of other pro and semipro critics, plus 22,000 citizen reviewers, and the chance to access all that data in one place, and the potential becomes clear.

The pro-am model

So CellarTracker's strength is providing that focal point for almost all you might want to know - a document of a wine tasted by different palates over time, what LeVine calls "fresher data points" than a one-time review, with the option to access market-moving data. This is the quintessence of what journalism wonks love to call the pro-am model.

So what's in it for the pros? They don't necessarily lose money or influence. That was what appealed to Meadows, who runs the Burghound site; he could become more useful to his readers without giving in to the Internet's everything-for-free mind-set.

"I could never get comfortable with the idea that I could give information away and have it pay, because this takes an enormous investment," says Meadows, who spends several months each year tasting in Burgundy. "Just travel expenses alone, just the time commitment, is incredible."

The one big hurdle: Neither of the two most significant market movers, Robert Parker's Wine Advocate and the Wine Spectator, are interested in playing along. Parker did not respond to a request for comment, though LeVine estimates some 5,000 Advocate subscribers use CellarTracker each day. Wine Spectator executive editor Tom Matthews says they have "no plans to partner with any other sites at this point."

New version coming

What's LeVine's angle? Right now, a mix of user payments, advertising and links to wine retailers. For the moment, wisely, he's not asking for cash from pro reviewers. "I don't want any of their money. I want more people to subscribe to their stuff, but I want the privilege to show their content to their customers."

A new version will launch next month, with tidier organization and navigation; improvements on mobile platforms should follow. (Currently iPhone users can access CellarTracker data through the Cor.kz service.) Imagine browsing a CellarTracker listing as you stand in a wine shop - instantly getting dozens of feedback points on the bottle in your hand - and you see how it could start to replace well-worn shelf talkers.

It's not a radical concept - giving wine drinkers information they can rely on at the right time. But putting that information all in one place is hugely valuable.